DIGITAL COMMON PRAYER: A DEMOCRATIC MEDIUM FOR ANGLICAN LITURGY
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia.
The story of the English Reformation is rarely told from the perspective of the revolutionary new medium of its time: the printed book. Books, regardless of their content but simply as a form of media, have political and social significance. Before even looking at the content of its liturgies, then, the very fact that Anglicans have a Book of Common Prayer communicates specific theological and political ideas.
We now take it for granted that we pray the daily office from the same book every day or that we can reach into the back of any pew in any Episcopal church across the country and pull out the same liturgical book. But the introduction of a printed book as the medium for authorized liturgical texts was once a new and rather contentious revolution.
When Thomas Cranmer’s first Book of Common Prayer was distributed in 1549, it sparked riots and acts of resistance throughout England. One of the largest rebellions was the so called Prayer Book Rebellion that took place in Devon and Cornwall. Tensions were already high between the monarchy and the Cornish people, as the crown had been slowly eroding their relative independence over the previous century. The Catholic Church had been rather accommodating to the Cornish people’s language and culture, and the monasteries in particular had been centers for scholarship preserving this identity. So, during the 1540s when monasteries were dissolved and the Catholic Church was expelled, the Cornish people saw the institutions that upheld their cultural identity quickly being swept away.
It was finally the appearance of a printed book—the 1549 Book of Common Prayer—that was the final spark needed to ignite a rebellion. It was the clearest instance yet of a top-down reform that (either inadvertently or perhaps intentionally) threatened to replace the language and practices of the Cornish people with the new standardized language and practices of the monarchy. Whereas before there could be variations within a single liturgical tradition, the introduction of print media in an official bounded prayer book made a powerful symbolic statement about the standardization (perhaps even creation) of a single set of practices as the “English” way of worshipping.
Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the medium is the message.” The medium used to deliver a message is never neutral: Regardless of the content it delivers, the medium itself produces a distinct set of ideas and a specific culture.
Society is currently transitioning from print media to digital media. As in the 16th century, the shift from print media to digital media will entail a new set of theological and political ideas having to do with the medium itself. If the era of print media could be summarized as a movement towards unification and standardization, the era of digital media, I think, will be one of increased plurality and democratic participation. In the context of liturgical texts, this could be called the shift from a Book of Common Prayer to Digital Common Prayer. The following 6 theses outline a thought experiment for this potential platform, specifically in the context of the Episcopal Church (USA):
6 Theses on Digital Common Prayer
1. It would primarily be about how we create, critique, and cultivate our liturgies rather than how we read them.
Electronic devices are already being used to read liturgies in the Episcopal Church. The Book of Common Prayer can be accessed via a website or through the Electronic Common Prayer app. Likewise, a number of churches provide their weekly service guides using electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, QR codes, or projectors, rather than printing full-text worship guides. Recently, the Task Force for Liturgical and Prayer Book Revision (the people tasked with overseeing prayer book revision in the Episcopal Church) published a draft document called “Common Prayer,” outlining their proposals for the next phase of prayer book revision. One of the proposals was “That the primary platform for our authorized liturgies be digital and online.” This is for both budgetary reasons—printing new prayer books would be expensive—but also to allow for “the authorization of more material than is possible within the limits of a printed book.”
However, the switch to Digital Common Prayer would entail more than simply reading from an electronic device and distributing liturgies online. It would primarily be about how we create, critique, and cultivate our liturgies through the new possibilities for online connectivity. In this sense, simply having an online collection of liturgical texts—e.g. the task force’s current proposal or the Church of England’s Common Worship—is still an instance of print media. Moving to a truly digital platform for common prayer has more to do with the process of revising liturgies than it does with their distribution and reception.
2. It would be a platform that facilitates democratic and collaborative participation in the revision process.
Think of the differences between getting the news online from the New York Times and getting the news from your Twitter feed. In the first case, you read an article that was written, edited, and distributed by professionals: It is the top-down approach that we usually find in print media. In the second case, you retweet a live update from a politician, which sparks a conversation with one of your followers, which leads to them tweeting about your conversation, which gets retweeted by someone else, etc. This second case is far more participatory and includes non-professionals: It is a bottom-up approach. Depending on your number of followers and your role in the invested communities, you are also engaged in the actual creation of the news and are not just a passive observer of the completed work of professional journalists.
Digital Common Prayer would be more like getting (or creating) the news on Twitter. Rather than using a collection of liturgies assembled by professionals, Digital Common Prayer would rely on the collaboration of everyone in the church to create, critique, and cultivate its liturgies.
3. It would be a platform for ongoing liturgical revision at the local level.
Rather than acting as a bound and closed canon of authority, Digital Common Prayer would be open and sustain a constant revision process. Liturgical revision would be an ongoing process that takes place at the local level, allowing for the needs and concerns of particular communities to be addressed. This would produce a theological imagination focused on the interplay between a community’s particular context and its liturgical practices. In print media, you have to write a liturgy that is general enough to be used across various places, times, and cultures, but with digital media, the interface allows communities to integrate liturgies into their own specific needs and contexts on an ongoing basis.
As an analogy, the platform would look similar to the open source hosting platform, GitHub. With this platform, coders work to collaborate on projects and can make their source code publicly available for others to adapt to their own projects and then make those developments publicly available again. Liturgies would be contextualized to particular worshipping communities through “branching” off from main liturgical texts. These branches would adapt and rework existing liturgical materials in light of a community’s particular needs, keeping as much or as little of the original as needed. Each particular branch would then be made publicly available for comments and critiques, resulting in potential “merges” back into the main canon of liturgical texts. These revised, publicly available liturgies would spark ideas for others in their own process of revision and adaption.
4. It WOULDN’T mean that churches could do whatever they want liturgically—otherwise, there would be no commonality to our prayer.
As Digital Common Prayer creates more flexibility for liturgies to be adapted to particular communities, this would all take place under the supervision and direction of bishops and proper diocesan authorities. It is in this sense that Digital Common Prayer would still be common prayer. But instead of the commonality coming from the exact wording of a liturgical text, it would come from our shared ecclesial structures which hold us accountable to certain traditions and practices. Digital Common Prayer would, in turn, hold these same ecclesial structures accountable through exerting democratic pressure back on them. The commonality of our prayer, then, would come from two directions: episcopal authority and the democratic involvement of each individual parish. This is already a quite familiar political structure for the Episcopal Church.
5. It WOULDN’T mean that every parish must use electronic devices for weekly worship guides.
Parishes could still print full-text worship guides every week or—my favorite option—create reusable service guides that can last for several years (i.e. using cardstock). Digital media would provide the platform for the creation and distribution of liturgies, but print media could still be a helpful medium for reading and using those liturgies in worship services.
6. It would facilitate both a greater sensitivity to the diversity of individual parishes and a greater flexibility for missionally minded parishes in a digital age.
As Anglicanism spread following the British Empire, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer went with it. Often, the only adaptions that took place in these varied contexts were translations into native languages, without any revision of the core concepts or cultural ideas. When the gates were finally opened for liturgical renewal in the 1950s, texts like the “Liturgy for South India” and the “Liturgy for Africa” were composed according to the trendy liturgical principles of the European/US Liturgical Movement, again ignoring local needs and contexts. It isn’t surprising, then, that these liturgies did not reflect the particular needs of particular churches.
By putting the agency for the creation and cultivation of liturgies into the hands of each individual parish, the people who are most familiar with the needs of their community would have the most say over their liturgies. Rather than having the top-down imposition of a bound liturgical book (think of the Cornish Prayer Book Rebellion at the beginning of this article), each community could preserve, celebrate, and share what makes their particular community unique. As the world moves into an era marked by greater plurality, Digital Common Prayer would give our church the platform it needs to continue proclaiming the gospel through our shared liturgical tradition.
Much of the thought in this article developed from papers and conversations at a 2019 conference on “Theology of the Digital” held in Princeton, NJ. The collection of papers from this conference is forthcoming in Cursor_ Zeitschrift Für Explorative Theologie 3.
